Lisa Jewell has found her sweet spot. After writing a few rom-coms, then sliding into family dramas, her books now land solidly in the psychological thriller category. And she’s not going anywhere.
“I’m settling here,” she says. “It was destined that I wasn’t going to write a thriller for my first novel, and I’m quite glad I didn’t—now. But this is where I was meant to be, and this is where I’m going to stick.”
And why wouldn’t she? The success the British novelist has found throughout her 19 novels is impressive. The Family Upstairs was an instant New York Times bestseller and was followed by Then She Was Gone which spent more than a year on the same list and sold over a million copies. Combined, her books have sold more than 5 million copies in 29 languages.
Now Jewell is out with her a new novel, The Night She Disappeared, about Tallulah, a missing teen mom whose own mother, Kim, will stop at nothing to find out what happened. It has all of the hallmarks readers expect from a Lisa Jewell blockbuster: more twists and turns than you can count, red herrings galore, complex character motivations, and an ending you won’t predict. Jewell knows the importance of a strong ending in a thriller, saying, “It comes down to such minute decisions in the end.… It’s a strange one because, for me, the ending is absolutely everything when you write a thriller. I’ve just read so many thrillers with disappointing endings and I couldn’t bear to put a book out there that had a disappointing ending. So, I have to take a deep breath and hope I’ve chosen the right outcome for my characters.”
But before we could talk about endings, we had to start at the beginning, with the inspiration for The Night She Disappeared.
I always love hearing where you get your ideas for new books because sometimes it’s just a quick passing
